vehicles
of knowing
We might begin with positing three essential kinds
of knowing: organismal knowing, semantic knowing, and their unity
which I would call psybiocognitive knowing. Admittedly the latter
is a catch-all. It is the holophore in which I locate the metaphor
of knowledge — for the moment. If we agree to my general categories,
we may proceed to a question I am regularly found in pursuit of
— are these vehicles or containers embodied more in the participants
or their connectivities?
We experience them as housed in individuals and collectives of identity,
yet from a more general perspective — both are equivalently
‘contained’ in the momentums and transports of connectivity.
I smell another bicameral model arising:. Connectivity vs Locality.
My experience is that Nature long ago realized she could store and
transmute just as adeptly in either domain — and I believe
that Life deploys this realization in its relations with maintenance,
elaboration and death. Regardless, the integration of local identity
with systemic connectivity produces an animal which is in every
case far more than the sum of these two hemispheres by many factors.
Our logics, models and the very contexts of our rationality depend
specifically upon highlighting Identity — and ‘locating’
things there. I must believe that our human relation with and experience
of holophores such as Justice would be very different indeed if
we prosecuted the sources of harm with the same fervor we prosecute
those who are largely the victims of predatory contexts and circumstance.
But I digress.
Of all the vehicles of knowing, I agree with Julian Jaynes that
the metaphor is certainly a root-feature of our consciousness in
the modern moment. I believe he and I both exhibit a desire to redefine
the common understandings and explorations of this connective weblike
affair we call a metaphor.
Without it, there is organismal knowing, and perhaps even momentary
conscious knowing — but we lack the key connective aspects
of sequence and reCognition. By virtue of how it is embodied, activated
and manipulated in ourselves and our connectivities — the
metaphor nearly qualifies as its own life-form. I believe that once
revealed, our history with this inward universe will change everything
it means to be human, as it has throughout our possibly rather brief
encounter with it.
In the history of the metaphor, I believe we can locate the ladder
of our species rise to sentience, and the general recapitulation
of this epic which we each ourselves experience in infancy and youth.
I believe it is crucial that we do so with all possible enthusiasm
and unity. We need this story with us, whatever its shape may be.
We at least need a reasonable analog — and we must not be
trapped building our own from available models which in turn become
functional cages, separating us from what our endeavor hoped for,
and promised.
While Jaynes’ model of metaphor is somewhat academic and complex,
it is an excellent resource from which we can remind ourselves of
our potentials for new relations with metaphor, while at the same
time giving us a basic foundation with which we can creatively explore
new questions about this realm of what we have become in our modern
highly semantic consciousness. For this reason, I feel it useful
to present an encapsulation of his model from his book The Origin
of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. In
a moment we will examine the elements of his model specifically.
First let me assemble them in sequence as I understand them.
A struction motivates cognitive relation. The process
begins with the establishment of an inward stage upon which to relate,
or spatialization. Elements of sensation, emotion,
perception and reaction are excerpted, and then coded and valued
upon this inward stage, resulting in their metaphication,
and subsequent relational organization. They then undergo narratization,
or sequencing. Conciliation, the final result,
is the projection of the these linkages and products back upon the
struction, and the experience being related with. At least two containers
are involved: The Analog I (me envisioned from
within), and the Metaphor Me (me envisioned from
within observed from outside). Both appear to be able to stage metaphication
activity of various kinds. Let us now examine the elements of his
model of the metaphor itself, and their relations using Jaynes’s
example — with the phrase “The snow blankets the ground”.
Fig.1
An idealized portrayal (toy) of the relationships
between the modern analog-self and experience following Julian Jaynes’
model of metaphication. In this model, he proposes that metaphors
are a primary transport of knowing, and that our relationship with
them has undergone a set of phase-leaps during which the essential
character of our inward spaces changed dramatically. These changes
accrued velocity away from one in which a personal and other gods
were experienced as inward sources and arbiters of conscious contents,
toward one in which spatializations in the synthesized self emerged
to displace them as authorities. In the Jaynsian Model of metaphor,
he identifies 4 principle elements, noting that each has undergone
radical change in meaning and experience over our linguistic and
conscious evolution. The analog I (green
circle) is where the activity of metaphication and parsing (organization
into meaning) occurs. What we see represented here is, in Jaynes’
model, really the aftermath of our loss of connectivity with the
gods, who were the pre-synthesis arbiters, parents, and rulers of
our minds, and of knowing.
o:O:o
The Metaphrand: What is being
relationally coded. The thing described — the snow and the
ground in relation.
The metaphrand is an organizational communiqué,
implicit in the poetics of the metaphier it will generate its own
likeness in. It acts selectively in the generation of the metaphier,
though the process is not linear — they inform each other’s
selection or construction. In our example, the metaphrand represents
‘how’ the snow is present with the ground in terms of
character. Qualities such as thickness and being a covering —
being soft, folded over what is beneath it, etc — are highlighted.
The Metaphier: The token of
relation — the blanket, a covering.
This element represents an extractive comparator which is selected
and credentialed as being relationally accurate by some active element
of consciousness, and then authorized to represent relation. In
many cases it is meant to highlight specific relations or character-features
of relation as well. In our example, the metaphier is the concept-meaning-image
of a blanket upon a bed.
The Paraphier(s): The attributes
shared with the metaphrand by the metaphier — qualities of
blankets covering things.
This element encodes and expresses the associations or attributes
— qualities of the metaphier, in this case the blanket. It
is here that the poetics of shape, softness, and random folds emerge
as locations of similarity or symmetry which are poetically conserved
.
The Paraphrand: The result:
the product of the projection of the paraphier back onto the metaphrand.
The paraphrand is the result when the associations
and poetic implications of the paraphiers’ relations are projected
back upon the metaphrand, revealing new or already encoded relation.
It is this projection which results in the qualities, characters
and connectivities of our metaphors.
The Analog I: This token represents
the self as seen from within. The I Am-ness of self.
This is the internal representation of self experienced when we
reach inward in the biocognitive gesture that results in consciousness.
It is the bubble of self, seen from the perspective of the singularity
at its core. Me from within me.
The Metaphor Me: This token represents the
simulation of self as seen from outside, by simulated others.
The analog me, is a child of the analog I, that is projected outside
the sphere of self. It is a simulation of self observed from without.
~#~
The Struction: The essential
organismal motive for relation.
A struction represents the motivational aspect of organismal circumstance
in its most elemental form. It is a being’s moment of attitude,
sensitivity, connectivity. Instruction + Construction. The character
of the struction generates much of the character of activity, assembly,
relation and conciliation.
Spatialization: A term for
the process of inwardly spatializing sensory experience, integrations,
and an analog eye.
The mind-space in which activity is represented prior to being recapitulated
as communication, or to the self as knowing. The activity of creation
and relation with metaphors occurs against a spatialized inward
domain, or ‘stage’. The character of the stage is also
formative in any activity or products resultant from its activation.
We tend to physically locate this space, in modern times, primarily
in our heads. Yet the entire body participates in all aspects of
its assembly, application, and maintainence. It has been variously
located in our body over time as our metaphors evolved, and is still
experienced in locations in our body, much as it has always been.
Most of them are not the head. Our brain may be the assembler and
specific audience of organismal knowing, but it is the translator
as much or more than it is the source. It speaks for those who have
no voice. Our cognitive relationship with spatialization has undergone
dramatic shifts, probably over relatively short time periods.
Excerption: The extractive activity of metaphor-genesis.
The product-shape is a subtractive highlight of what it represents.
By using the term blanket, we are excerpting specific qualities
of snow and blankets to present a compressed and generalized likeness.
Narratization: The process of arranging
tokens in sequence.
The snow is doing something with the ground, and I am doing something
in response, which is representing it in my phrase. This is a reflective
process, which is more complex than it superficially appears. Narratization
allows us to encode another domain of information: sequence of arisal,
and possibly of relation. Thus the progeny of a holophore —
the metaphore — points back through time to its genesis.
Conciliation: The integration and activation
of the above elements.
The result of parsing the assembly and its integrations, sources
and implications. We ‘understand’ that “The snow
blankets the ground” through conciliation. As I understand
Jaynes’ model, this is an outcome of the projection of the
paraphrand back onto the metaphrand.
~#~
I believe in general that this model is sound — as far as
models go. We could certainly be more specific, and indeed we can
and will craft vast behemoths of knowing on such topics, I am sure.
However imperfect Jaynes’ model may be, it provides
us with foundation with which we can futher explore the genesis-phases
of its elements and relations — or a template with which we
may draw inspiration to craft our own speculative maps and ladders.
What we may notice from all of this however is significant. Metaphors
are always crafted from ‘already known’ elements, qualities,
and relations. If we are inactive in refining and redefining these
‘older’ metaphors we can find ourselves in the cognitive
position of supporting something that opposes ourselves. Metaphors
are tools with which we must all be equally conversant — yet
this domain of understanding lies almost entirely outside the experience
and traning of the common person, the academician, the politican,
the judge, the police, and the soldiery of our nation. Where then
are these understandings housed and pursued?
When we look closely into the genesis of our languages, root-metaphors,
and their sources — we will find that there have been many
phases of complexification, infoldment, enfoldment, and expression
of new status. Each phase lies not in our distant history —
but instead behind our systems of knowing and our moment-to-moment
expressions of organismal and systemic sentience.
With Jaynes’ model under out belt we can recognize that there
is some complexity in the domain of our metaphoric activity, and
we have at least one idea of its general shape. We can also recognize
that our modeling of reality is extractive and largely biased (which
isn’t really a problem, we are each unique — we should
be biased) toward precursors. We will metaphy based upon expansions
of previous models — since we can only select metaphiers we
are familiar with. How then do we deal with novelty? We must somehow
string together rings of ‘old metaphors’ in order to
encode (and thus remember, reflect upon or communicate about) our
novel perspective or experience. We are not really entitled to invent
metaphors, although we do enjoy some limited freedom in this domain,
and slang is the negative label we attach to this domain. Unless
it occurs in science, war or commerce — in which case
it is jargon.
Shortly, we will come to a place where we may explore some models
of our ascension in analogs. Before we begin, we should take a moment
to look at some general models of evolution as they relate to the
conscious development of our species. Not in specifics, but in broad
outlines.
o:O:o
